In conversation at Medicine for Nightmares in San Francisco, Jazmina Barrera and Megan McDowell join forces to discuss the life and work of Elena Garro through Barrera’s biography of Garro, The Queen of Swords, and McDowell’s translation of her short stories, The Week of Colors.
In what was at first meant to be a short essay about the influential Mexican writer Elena Garro (1916-1988), Jazmina Barrera’s deep curiosity and exploration give us a singular portrait of a complex life in The Queen of Swords. Sifting through the writer’s archives at Princeton, Barrera is repeatedly thwarted in her attempt to fully know her subject. Traditional means of research—the correspondence, photos, and books—serve only to complicate and cloud the woman and her work. The Queen of Swords is a portrait of a woman that also serves as an alternative history of Mexico City; a cry-out for justice; and an homage to the unknowable. It transcends mere biography, supplanting something tidy and authoritative for a sprawling experiment in understanding.
Published in tandem with The Queen of Swords, The Week of Colors makes the short stories of Elena Garro, the “cursed mother of magical realism” (El Mundo), available in English for the first time. With The Week of Colors, Elena Garro laid the groundwork for the literary movements that would shape the landscape of Latin American fiction and beyond. Here you’ll find the early roots of magical realism, feminist horror, and anticolonial speculative fiction. In this volume, Garro highlights the violence in our history, our homes, and our hearts, in vivid color.
